On the north-western edge of Edinburgh are the remains of what was once a glittering country pile estate, a high-status property with lands and outbuildings housing a wealthy local family.

​Today the former Cammo Estate is mostly overgrown and ruined, although it is kept and maintained by Edinburgh City Council, and is a popular spot for dog walkers to stretch their pooches' legs, and for children to explore and exercise their imaginations. 

Built originally at the end of the seventeenth-century, the estate grew under the ownership of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik in the early eighteenth-century.

​He laid out the parklands which surrounded the house and buildings, and put in an ornamental canal for visitors to stroll beside and paddle small boats upon.

After being heavily vandalised - two fires, in particular, were deliberately set, destroying much of what was left of the original house - the property was gifted to Edinburgh City Council, who have maintained it ever since.

Today, visitors can stroll through the once luscious orangery, see the confifers and monkey puzzle tree in the old pinetum, tramp beside the ornamental canal and see the ruined stable blocks.

It is thought that the estate, and its once grand family house, provided an inspiration to the author Robert Louis Stevenson, who used the setting in his novel Kidnapped, which also featured other nearby locations such as Corstorphine Hill and the waterfront at Cramond. 

Estates such as Cammo - whose name probably derived from an old term for 'bend in the river' - help to give Edinburgh some of its unique character, and provide visitors and locals with a unique glimpse in the culture and heritage of the city's past. 

Find out more about Edinburgh's history with my private city walking tours!

In a city so packed with literary figures, influences and associations that it became the world's first UNESCO City of Literature, one of Edinburgh's most famous authors remains almost as famous now as during his own lifetime - thanks to the intervention of film and television, possibly more so.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in the city on 22 May, 1859. The building where he was born was on Picardy Place at the east end of Queen Street in the New Town. Although the row of houses were demolished during the 1960s, the approximate location is marked by a statue of Doyle's greatest creation, Sherlock Holmes. (The statue is currently AWOL while they finish the installation of the new tram line, but will shortly be reinstated near the original site.)

Scotland plays little part in the Holmes stories, most of which were set in London, or rural locations in England, and so it is no surprise that comparatively few readers associate Doyle with Edinburgh. Growing up here as a young man, he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh's medical school, where he fell under the influence of the man who would inspire fiction's most famous detective.

Dr Joseph Bell was a tutor at the school, famed for his adherence to principles of observation and logical deduction for making his medical diagnoses. 

​After the first Sherlock Holmes story - A Study in Scarlet - appeared in 1886, the similarity between Holmes and Bell was so clear that Robert Louis Stevenson, who had also studied under Bell, wrote to Doyle from his home in Samoa:  "My compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. ... can this be my old friend Joe Bell?"

Since his creation, Holmes has acquired the Guinness World Record for being the most portrayed movie character in cinematic history.

Curiously, although he is often referred to as Conan Doyle, on his baptismal record from St Mary's Catholic Cathedral, which still stands near the site of his birth on Picardy Place, Conan is recorded as one of the boy's two middle names (the other being Ignatius...). In many library and reference indexes he is listed correctly by his surname alone; Doyle, A.C.

Among his non-literary interests, Doyle was also a keen sportsman, playing cricket alongside fellow authors JM Barrie and AA Milne, as well as for the Marylebone Cricket Club. ​

One of Doyle's most famous associations was with the world of mystics and the supernatural, where - in contrast with his most famous literary creation - he proved surprisingly gullible.

​Doyle was famously taken in by the Cottingley Fairies affair of 1917, when two young girls were pictured in photographs with a collection of dancing fairies, which were later proven to be a hoax.

​ A short association with American magician Harry Houdini saw Doyle attempt to demonstration proof of an afterlife, and associated beliefs, while Houdini vociferously campaigned to defraud mystics and mediums. (At the west end of the New Town is the city's Conan Doyle Centre, a public venue for "spiritual development, intellectual discussion and scientific exploration".)

Doyle died at his home in Sussex, England, in 1930. The statue of Sherlock Holmes was unveiled in the 1990s, and visitors can still enjoy a drink or a meal at the Conan Doyle pub, near the site of his birth - having a drinking hole named after you is one of the greatest forms of tribute Scotland can offer its famous sons and daughters.

Explore Doyle's Edinburgh in more detail with my private walking tours of the city! ​

Like Rome, Edinburgh's city centre is traditionally said to have been built on seven hills - many of them having been lost or disguised by building and development in the past 300 years (Moultray's Hill, for example, was approximately under where Multrees Walk in the New Town is today).

​These hills were specifically in the area covered by the centre of the city - outlying hills, such as Blackford and Corstorphine, were not counted in the original seven.

Between these hills, or peaks of higher ground, the landscape ran in deep ravines, the most obvious ones the two valleys carved out by glacial action during the last Ice Age.

The valley where Princes Street Gardens are today, and the parallel valley south of the Royal Mile, where the Cowgate runs, still divide the city into a series of peaks and troughs, and it was in order to make these troughs easier to navigate that six bridges were built.

Again, these bridges are only the ones immediately within the city centre - the likes of Stockbridge and the Dean Bridge are further out, and weren't originally integral to navigating the heart of the city.

Here are the six bridges which connect Edinburgh's city centre - how many of them will you cross (perhaps unknowingly!) during your visit?

NORTH BRIDGE
Probably the most obvious one, North Bridge runs over the top of Waverley Station, and was originally the main access road between the Old and the New Towns. The current bridge is the third to have been built on this site after previous versions either collapsed or were in need of improvement.

SOUTH BRIDGE
Designed as continuation of North Bridge to the other side of the Royal Mile, South Bridge crosses the Cowgate, and has only one of its original 19 arches visible today. The others were concealed by the buildings which were put up alongside the bridge after it was built in the 1780s. ​

The vaults of South Bridge are where the 'underground' tours of Edinburgh will take you - not technically beneath the level of the ground, but beneath the level of road built across the valley...

KING'S BRIDGE
Beneath Edinburgh Castle, at the base of the rock, is the curiously low, wide span of the King's Bridge, running over the top of King's Stables Road. Opened in 1831, this bridge was integral to the construction of Johnston Terrace, providing an accessible route to the top of the Royal Mile for the first time in Edinburgh's history.

​GEORGE IV BRIDGE
Another elevated roadway, designed by Thomas Hamilton, also crossing the Cowgate, but from the Lawnmarket section of the Royal Mile. Two arches of the bridge - named for King George IV - remain externally visible, and during the summer the big Underbelly festival venue takes audiences into the underside of the arches for its performance spaces.

​REGENT BRIDGE
Crossing the ravine where Calton Road used to run through the valley where Waverley Station is today, the Regent Bridge connected Princes Street to the newly developed areas of Regent Road and (today) St Andrew's House. The single span is high and narrow, with commemorative columns at the top, and was opened in 1819.

WAVERLEY BRIDGE
Finally, Waverley Bridge, connecting the bottom of Cockburn Street to Princes Street, provides access to the railway station, and forms the second access bridge across the northern glacial valley.  

Explore Edinburgh's hills and valleys with a private walking tour of the city!

Trinity College Church was founded in 1460, and stood in the village of Calton, just outside the boundaries of the old city of Edinburgh.

Calton nestled in the valley between the Royal Mile and Calton Hill - the site today is occupied by Waverley Station, and it's hard to imagine that a large settlement once existed in this area.

As the railway station needed to grow to accommodate the increased traffic of visitors and businessmen drawn to the city in the 1840s, and in a not-so-rare act of cultural annihilation, it was decided that the village of Calton would be demolished to create space for the new, improved railway station.

At one time the city's botanical garden had been located in the valley where Calton sat, before itself moving further out to town (and later again to its current site at Inverleith). Other features of the village didn't survive quite so well...

As the church at the centre of Calton was a historically significant structure, established by Mary of Gueldres, wife of King James II, the city council was paid £16,000 by the North British Railway Company (who operated the main lines into the station) to handle the church's preservation. The decorative altarpieces from the church, a series of panels painted by Flemish artist Hugo van de Goes, were remarkable for surviving the Reformation in 1560, and were removed from the church before its demolition. Today the four panels can be seen in the National Gallery of Scotland.

And so in 1848 the church was deconstructed, the stones dismantled and individually numbered - the plan was to reconstruct the church a little later in another location...

The stones of Trinity College Church were stacked at the side of the valley during the construction of the new station - and that's where they remained for the next twenty years. In the 1870s, when city authorities eventually decided to reconstruct the historic church, they discovered - quel surprise - not all the original stonework was where it had been left. In the intervening decades, it is thought that significant quantities of the stone had been 'borrowed' and used in the construction of myriad other buildings. 

And so, when they came to reconstruct the church on Chalmers Close, behind the modern Jury's Inn Hotel, the builders only had enough stone to construct a truncated version of the original church.

Today Trinity Apse, as it is known, still stands on the lane between Jeffrey Street and the Royal Mile, and formerly was used as the city's brass rubbing centre.

​Visitors passing the building can appreciate the strange, foreshortened dimensions of the church, and close examination shows the numbers on some of the stones, a leftover from the original deconstruction project.

See Trinity Apse and other highlights of the Old Town with my private city walking tours!